Parallel universes could solve a big problem with black holes

When it comes to black holes, we are caught between a rock and a hard place. A black hole, it seems, either destroys information in violation of quantum mechanics or it is enveloped by a blazing firewall, defying Einstein’s general relativity. But a new analysis using the “many worlds” interpretation, which says that each possible outcome of a quantum event exists in its own world, shows that black holes present no such paradoxes.

In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking showed that all black holes give off thermal radiation and eventually …